Category Archives: Fundraising

Hello Everyone. We’ve been full of a very nasty flu these last ten days or so here at Brittle Star. Trust us, you don’t want details, but it explains why you’ve not heard too much from us lately. We’re really sorry about that because we do like to have a good old chat with you and encourage you to submit to the magazine or get your entries in for the Poetry & Short Story Competition.

We’re on the mend now (although still a bit washed out) and we just want to let you know tomorrow is our competition deadline. If you want to get your entries in you have until at 12 Midnight to enter online, and postal entries should be postmarked 14 March. We’re manning and womanning the computers so if you have any problems do drop us a line. Click here to enter http://www.brittlestar.org.uk/competition-2/

Our judges Pascale Petit and Nicholas Royle have been brilliant helping us to spread the word, but you, our lovely writer-friends, can also help us by sharing the link with anyone you think might want to enter. As you know, we’re volunteer-based and not for profit which means money raised from the competition goes back into producing the magazine so your entries are a massive help to us. First prize is £250 + publication + a reading in London.

Click HERE to enter – it only costs £5 and you could win £250. (And don’t forget if you subscribe or become a Patron you get a free entry).

In a bid to make Brittle Star much more self sufficient…

…and to help free up some of our own time to dedicate to it, we’ve joined Patreon, a new donation website that enables you – our lovely fans and subscribers – to support what we do for as little as just over £1 a month*.

As many of you will know, we’ve been running Brittle Star for over 15 years and publish two issues a year. We’re a very tiny team – just two people – me, Jacqueline Gabbitas, and Martin Parker – and we run it around our day jobs. Any money Brittle Star makes from subscriptions and sales goes back into the magazine’s print costs.

Over the years we’ve learned through lots and lots of trial and error that when we give the magazine some proper time and attention beyond the editing and production, the rewards are bountiful! Just one to two dedicated days a week on admin, promotion and outreach boosts sales of the magazine, subscribers and submissions. And this is why we’ve turned to Patreon.

What Patreon is, is a website that helps creative people collectively fundraise to be able to make the things they do – in our case our magazine. It’s patronage in the way artists and writers used to be supported, but much more community-driven. There are some brilliant projects and businesses on Patreon all sponsored by fans and supporters who want to give just a little a month to be able to help. And we think it really will help.

It’s a new way for us to thank our supporters, keep in touch with writers and readers, and be paid for the creative work we do for the magazine. We also want it to be another way of donating and subscribing to the magazine at the same time (with a few perky perks thrown in just for our patrons). If you’re already a subscriber, you might think about becoming a patron to take advantage of the exclusive rewards! And we have some lovely rewards – from access to our Patreon pages to exclusive e-magazines to behind the scenes sneaky peaks.

And here’s something slightly bonkers – if only 5% of people who follow us on social media donated $2 (about £1.60) a month we’d be half way to hitting our first goal of £750! (And you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook too, if you don’t already!)

If you’d like to become a Patron of the Arts (this sound super-posh!) in the old-fashioned way, then please do join on www.patreon.com/brittlestar.

*Patreon charges VAT and an admin fee of about 20-25p (depending on the exchange rate).

Issue 34. If you’ve not seen it in the flesh yet it has a white front cover and a wonderful Frances Barry illustration of a magpie on the back cover.

There’s nothing else on the front cover: no print, no watermark, no colour, just white. But on some of the copies that we got back from the printers there are things. They might be little track marks or clip marks or smudges of black, but they’re there. They came about during the packing stage of the printing because the paper stock we chose was uncoated and so it lifted ink matter (a bit like an offset print) from the other magazines. This fascinated us, but it also meant we had 70 unusable magazines – this is the profit margin the magazine needs to live off. So we asked our printers, the wonderful Imprint Digital, first, what was wrong, and second, what could be done. They told us to always use coated stock if we don’t want to print an image on the cover, and then they sent us some more. We could do what we wanted with the faulty-ish copies.

So we decided to pass our good fortune on to you.

There’s nothing wrong with the inside of the magazine – the very important stuff – and the marks to anyone else wouldn’t be such a problem, so we’re offering these slight-seconds to you for just £3 (through Stonewood Press because we don’t sell single copies) with free P&P in the UK with the #pimpmystar code voucher.

But we ask you to have some fun with them – decorate them, glue things on them, draw on them, write your own poem or flash-fiction on them – and then send them in to us at brittlestarmag@gmail.com or upload them to Pinterest (but tell us about them too) and we’ll make a gallery of them! And the two we love the most (one I choose, one Martin chooses) we’ll give a subscription or subs-renewal to. You must sign it and send it or upload it so that we know who you are. And if we really love them we might even use one for a back cover of a future issue!

To start you off, here’s mine!

There’s been a lot of shooting stars this month and I like birds – I get the feeling these two are gossiping but I don’t know what about! (I feel a caption competition coming on!)

And that action is: help us support new writing in the UK by donating to my Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, Small Grass.

Just before Christmas I’d finished the first full draft of The Book Of Grass, my book-length environmental poem written in the voice of grass. I got to thinking about the imagery and the abstract nature of most of the poem-sections and did that little fantasy that many of us do and pictured it in book form. But in my head there were two books – a more formal, conventional book, and an artists’ chapbook. I could see very clearly the pages of the chapbook – I could almost feel them. But I didn’t want to produce a book for the sake of having a chapbook, I wanted it to work harder.

I’d been talking with Martin about the titles he wanted to bring out with Stonewood Press, and the nervousness a lot of small publishers have – but rally against – in these challenging times, and I thought, ‘why don’t I make the chapbook a fundraiser for Stonewood?’ So I put this to Martin and he was very interested in producing a book with artworks. I would give the poems and my time for free and all profits raised from sales would go to Stonewood. We were driving down to London as we chatted about it and we both said – almost freakily at the same time – why don’t we ask Frankie if she’d be interested in making the artworks? Frankie, if you don’t know, is the celebrated children’s author Frances Barry, but she’s also an astonishing artist in her own right (and she’s done cover artwork for Brittle Star in the past!). We asked. She was delighted (in her wonderfully humble way she said, ‘wouldn’t Martin’s illustrations be better’ – to which we both answered a resounding, NO!). She has also generously donated her artworks and her time to this campaign. And very quickly she produced as many artworks as poems I gave her. Her vision is sublime.

We’re bringing out the book soon and will launch it in somewhere lovely – I’ll let you know. We’re hoping to tour the artworks, so if you can suggest anywhere to approach – or if you’re a venue and can put it on yourself – please do get in touch.

And to make the most of my fundraising efforts I decided to do a crowdfunding campaign with Indiegogo. Small Grass. It has some bonkers perks – doob, hairy-flowered woollybutt, limestone bottlewashers – which translates to books and signed special editions and prints and handwritten poems and even the possibility of a posh tea with me and Martin – and within the first half hour we’d had two donations. Cool! Have a look at the video and see what you think.

If you’d like to donate, please go to the Indiegogo site, or if you can’t afford it, please just let people know about the book and the campaign. The more people who talk about it, the better it will be for us! #smallgrassfund